Phillip Lovejoy, executive director of the Harvard Alumni Association, presents ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ President Clayton Spencer with the association’s Harvard Medal on May 25. Behind Spencer is Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust. The HAA’s annual meeting took place in Tercentenary Theatre, Harvard, during the afternoon program of Harvard’s Commencement. (Rose Lincoln/Harvard University)

A senior administrator at Harvard University for more than 15 years before coming to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, President Clayton Spencer was honored with a Harvard Medal this week for service to the university.

“With conviction and humility that underscore your fierce commitment to higher education,” Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust said in presenting the award to her ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ counterpart, “you have served as an astute and forthright adviser to four presidents.”

Spencer, who came to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in 2012, was vice president for policy and associate vice president for higher education policy at Harvard during the 1990s and 2000s. In conferring the medal, Faust pointed to Spencer’s instrumental role in such accomplishments as the establishment of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the creation of the Crimson Summer Academy for high school students, and the expansion of financial aid — which remains a priority for Spencer as ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ president.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Spencer has also overseen new initiatives in the realms of curriculum, institutional resilience, and campus life — specifically, the establishment of a program in digital and computational studies; the strengthening of programming in campus diversity and inclusion; substantially enhancing fundraising; and, through the Purposeful Work initiative, redefining how the college prepares students for work and career.

Recipient of a master’s degree in the study of religion from Harvard in 1982, Spencer returned to her former school and workplace on a rainy May 25, Harvard’s Commencement Day, to receive the . Also receiving the 2017 Harvard Medal were former museum executive Warren Little and architect Henry Cobb.

The talk is open to the public at no charge and is sponsored by the philosophy and psychology departments at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

The Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard, Banaji has extensively researched human thinking and emotion as it develops in social contexts. She focuses on mentality in its unconscious forms, exploring the influence of the unconscious mind on how we assess ourselves and others regarding membership in social groups — age, ethnicity, gender, social class.

“From such research,” she writes, “I speak to the question of how well-intentioned people behave in ways that deviate from their own impeccable, consciously stated intentions, and how this state of affairs compromises individuals and corrupts institutions.”

Her objective is “to ask how the discovery of such ‘mind bugs’ ought to guide and transform our notions of corruption, duty and fairness, and to ensure that the moral arc of the universe indeed bends toward justice in democratic societies.”

Banaji was born and raised in India. She received her Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1986 and taught at Yale from 1986 to 2001 before moving to Harvard. She has also taught at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

She is a fellow of psychological science associations including the Society for Experimental Psychologists, the Association of Psychological Science and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. Banaji has served on the editorial boards of such scientific journals as Psychological Review, Psychological Science and Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. She currently serves on the advisory board of the Oxford University Press.

Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology, Harvard University, will give a talk titled King’s Dream, American Realities: Paradoxical Trends in the African-American Condition at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 4, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave., ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College. Sponsored by the College Lectures Committee, the Multicultural Center, the sociology department and the African American studies department, this lecture is open to the public at no cost.

Author of Rituals of Blood: The Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Counterpoint, 1999), received a Bachelor of Science in economics from London University and a doctorate in sociology from the London School of Economics. After faculty appointments at the London School of Economics and the University of the West Indies, Patterson moved to Harvard in 1969 and was appointed professor the following year.

An early historical and literary interest in Jamaican slavery matured into a sociological fascination with slave society as a system of total domination. Patterson’s dissertation, The Sociology of Slavery: Jamaica, 1655-1838, was published in 1967.

Patterson’s academic interests moved in three main directions: the comparative study of slavery; the study of its antithesis, freedom; and the study of socioeconomic underdevelopment with special reference to Jamaica and the Caribbean Basin. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study was published by Harvard Press in 1982.

Patterson has explored the problem of underdevelopment in papers on the Caribbean and many policy-oriented reports prepared for the government of Jamaica during his tenure as special adviser to Prime Minister Michael Manley for social policy and development (1972-1980). His various interests led to the publication of Ethnic Chauvinism: The Reactionary Impulse (Stein & Day, 1977).

Patterson’s study of slavery and domination prompted an exploration of its shadow concept, freedom, beginning with the first of a two-volume study, Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (Basic Books, 1991). He received the 1991 National Book Award in nonfiction for this volume.

Patterson is completing the second volume of Freedom, dealing with the modern world. At the same time, he is shifting the focus of his research to contemporary America with special emphasis on the intersecting problems of race, immigration and multiculturalism. He has written two volumes of a trilogy in this area, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s  “Racial” Crisis (Basic Civitas, 1997) and Rituals of Blood: The Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Counterpoint, 1999).

At one time, Patterson pursued a parallel career as a novelist and critic. He has published three novels, The Children of Sisyphus, An Absence of Ruins and Die the Long Day.

Patterson received the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the in 1983 (The Sorokin Prize), and was co-winner of the Ralph Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association for the best scholarly work on the subject of pluralism. He is a Fellow of the .